Page 1322 - Week 04 - Thursday, 5 May 2022
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16,400 blocks, across five years, across the entire city. How many do you think there will be in Tuggeranong? Will it be a thousand or 500? There is not one single block in Tuggeranong.
Let me make it clear to the people of the deep south that those on the government side of this argument will not support our motion and they will say that it is because we are being reckless and they care about Tuggeranong. In reality, it is because Tuggeranong is irrelevant to them and they want to make it even more irrelevant. What makes the people of Tuggeranong think that the government is ever going to spend serious time, money and effort in an area of the city that is, by their design, declining in population? What makes them believe that their children and grandchildren will ever have employment opportunities? What makes them think that the government will ever fund schools properly?
Another set of figures came out which showed that a stack of Tuggeranong schools are under capacity and continue to decline. It is no coincidence that, as the number of Tuggeranong schools are teetering on the brink of unviability, we have a new school about to open in Googong—no way!—because that is where the people of Tuggeranong are going. What makes the people of Tuggeranong think that this government will ever spend money on their roads or fix their footpaths?
At the end of the day, what do you think will happen with the government’s own landmark infrastructure project, the light rail line? Let’s talk about the light rail line. What makes you think that they are going to spend $3 billion-plus to build a light rail line to the only part of town where the population is declining? Come on; get a grip, down south!
When the local Greens member, Mr Davis, stands to speak and rejects even the suggestion of assessing the feasibility of progressing with residential development in west Tuggeranong, he is actually showing contempt for the valley. Mr Davis is the business spokesman, is he not? I am sure he is. He is showing contempt for the valley and conceding that we are just going to wither on the vine. So I strongly support the motion in its original form.
MS CLAY (Ginninderra) (5.03): I would like to speak about Ms Lee’s motion and about Minister Gentleman’s amendments to that motion, and I would like to tell a story. It is a story we hear a lot in here. We usually only hear it in slices, but it is really important to tell this story the whole way through. It is not very helpful if we just look at tiny little bits out of context.
There is a context for this story. The context for this story is that we are in a climate crisis. We are in an extinction crisis. We have a massive loss of habitat. We are losing habitat faster than at any other point in history. And we have a homelessness crisis. This is not a distant, global story. These things are happening here. These are all things that we have given words to here—that we have acknowledged here. Frankly, they are all things we have directly and tangibly experienced, but I think a lot of people in here simply do not believe they are happening.
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